The purpose of this work included the annotation of audio recordings of bird vocalizations to be used to train a machine learning algorithm to automatically detect bird calls. In addition, this work was intended to demonstrate the ability of The Cacophony Project’s mobile phone based ‘Bird Monitor’ for on-going monitoring of bird vocalizations.This work is important because it forms part of The Cacophony Project’s strategy to provide a low cost and robust means of collecting bird vocalization information to help determine the effectiveness of pest control activities. The main results show that the Bird Monitor does reliably capture bird calls over an extended period and can be used to create many annotated recordings from a real situation. It is concluded that the approach of choosing the distinct call of the Morepork as an entry into the area of automatic bird call counting was valid.